1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of data processing systems. More particularly, this invention relates to the control of exception processing within data processing systems.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is known to provide data processing systems including multiple processing units each executing .a stream of program instructions corresponding to a processing thread. Examples of such systems are graphics processing units which often include a large number of graphics processing cores each executing a stream of program instructions performing a different part of the overall processing being performed by the graphics processing unit. An example is where tile-based graphics processing is performed and each graphics processing core performs an operation, such as a shading operation, upon a different tile within the overall image. Another example of a system including multiple processing units is. symmetric multiprocessing system as are becoming increasingly common for general purpose processing. Within such systems it is known that different parts of the processing may be performed upon different processing units, for example one processor core may be dedicated to calculating numerical results and another processor core may be dedicated to generating the graphical data for displaying those numerical results.
It is also known within the field of data processing that a processor may be subject to an interrupt signal, which serves to interrupt the current processing being performed and redirect program flow to execution of exception handling code. Such interrupts are frequently found within real-time processing systems for dealing with physical events. It is also possible to use interrupt for controlling scheduling within multi-tasking systems.